Kaya Oakes resides in my pantheon of literary alterna-goddesses. She is an award-winning poet (Telegraph), author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the co-founder and senior editor of Kitchen Sink magazine ---a wickedly hip publication that ran from 2002 – 2007 which featured saucy essays, interviews, reviews and noodlings on media, art and culture.

Oakes grew up in Oakland, California, where she bounced back and forth between Catholic and public schools in the 1970’s and 80’s. Her adolescent perception of the Catholic Church --- formed while doing a lot of eye-rolling --- was shaped by humorless nuns, the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, and the Church services her family attended which featured Vatican II reforms such as, “folk Mass,” liturgical dance, and occasional "reflections" by female parishioners.

As a preteen she viewed the Church as “clunky and dorky,” but secretly enjoyed the late night Masses served in candlelight. When she was a senior in high school, Oakes took a trip to Spain with her classmates. In Ávila, surrounded by medieval churches and baroque cathedrals, the only thing Oakes felt about her Catholic heritage was shame.

After high school, Oakes pursued creative writing and steeped herself in indie culture and leftist politics. Suffering from a “generational propensity for snark and cynicism” Oakes assumed that she was an atheist. But when she caught herself praying and making the sign of the cross whenever she saw a dead animal on the side of the road, she began to question her unbelief and realized she’d been faking atheism.

Oakes starting sneaking into Catholic Mass services where she found a measure of peace she couldn’t find anywhere else. When she finally confessed to her shrink that she believes in “The Catholic God” she felt like she had just blurted out that she believes in leprechauns.

Tired of pretending she doesn’t believe in God, Oakes decides to fully confront the Church she left behind. She begins attending weekly catechism meetings at a liberal-leaning parish, gets confirmed, grits her teeth at the Vatican, hashes out her issues with Jesus, re-discovers some kick-ass women saints to pray to, helps her church feed the homeless, meets a group of progressive lesbians and ex-nuns who are fighting the Church from within, joins their “pray and bitch” group, researches original Hebrew texts, cracks open the essence of the gospel, is asked to give gospel reflections in the Church, becomes a budding theologian, and fights like hell for LGBTQ rights, reproductive freedom and radical inclusion.

This book made my heart leap, YESYESOHGODYES!

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I'm so glad there are people left in the Catholic church who are feeding the hungry, fighting for queer rights and equality, and doing all the stuff the old white men running the thing dislike so much. It's easy to get fed up and leave as soon as possible (was easy for me, anyway) and get your LGBT+ activism, social justice, etc. elsewhere. But if anything's going to change the pathetic out-of-touch old-white-single-men paradigm of the church, it's people like this. And since the church still has such power and relevance, whether I like it or not, I can't comfortably ignore it completely, so it's cheering to think it has such people in it.

Oakes refers to a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute which revealed that 98% of Catholic use birth control and another poll by the Public Religion Institute which indicated that more than 75% of practicing Catholics support gay marriage and civil unions.

It really makes me wonder if it's just a relative handful of extremely loud-mouthed, rich bullies who are pulling all the misogynist and homophobic strings in this world.....